Journey through the heavens with 30 amazing stargazer pictures

We look at The Hubble Heritage Project's collection of breathtaking images.

The Hubble Space Telescope is easily the most famous of NASA's Great Observatories program. Though the telescope had a troubled start, a much-publicized repair mission corrected its vision problems and paved the way for it to produce some of the most stunning images ever recorded. A large number of images have been assembled at the Hubble Heritage Image Gallery for viewing, and Ars has selected thirty of the nicest for presentation below.

Like many deep space images, this one depicts phenomena invisible to the human eye. Here, the galaxy Hercules A (about 2.1 billion light years from Earth) shoots million-light-years-long streamers of high energy plasma. The plasma is only visible at radio wavelengths. This image is a composite of Hubble observations and data from the Very Large Array in New Mexico.

Herbig Haro 110 is one of a class of objects that are commonly observed near stars in the process of forming. HH 110, located about 1,300 light years from Earth in the constellation Orion, has a gas tail stretching more than a thousand times our solar system's diameter.

Though it appears as if these two galaxies are passing through each other, one's just closer to Earth than the other. NGC 3314a and b are 117 million and 140 million light years from Earth, respectively, and are aligned so that they look to be pinwheeling through each other.

NGC 1864 is a globular cluster, a large, spherical collection of stars bound together by gravity. Far smaller than galaxies but still incredibly large, globular clusters are relatively common. This particular one is only 160,000 light years from Earth.

Centaurus A, an elliptical galaxy more than ten million light years from Earth, is shown in exquisite detail in this "panchromatic" image. The picture includes information stretching from the ultraviolet to the near-infrared, represented as different colors in the visible spectrum.

More than three hundred million light years from Earth lies the interacting galaxies known as Arp 273. The structure they form is composed of the large spiral galaxy UGC 1810, with a smaller companion called UGC 1813 hanging close by. UGC 1813's gravitational pull warps its larger neighbor and gives Arp 273 a flower-like appearance when viewed from Earth's perspective.

It's not an artifact or a lens flare—the Red Rectangle Nebula's unique shape is caused by the long gas jets pumping out its central binary star. The jets, coupled with the object's orientation relative to Earth, yields its unusual shape.

The Tarantula Nebula (which we've already visited once in this slide show) is an active place, cosmologically speaking. This picture shows a 100-light-year-wide close-up of a stellar nursery within it.

A thin remnant of gas is all that's left of the supernova SN 1006, which became the brightest object in the sky in the year 1006. SN 1006's explosion was recorded by contemporary observers in China, Egypt, Iraq, Japan, Swizerland, and North America.

Unlike the optical trick that appears to merge NGC 3314a and b, Arp 148 actually is composed of two colliding galaxies. This catastrophic mash-up is located 500 million light years from Earth; the two interacting galaxies have oscillated into their current ring-and-tail shape.

This is the supernova remnant N 63A, located in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The exploding star that birthed this expanding cloud has long since died, but the wavefront continues to clear out the surrounding space like a cosmic broom.

Close-in detail of the Dumbbell Nebula, in the constellation Vulpecula, about 1,200 light years from Earth. The image shows some of the "knots" in the nebula caused by the interaction of gasses with different temperatures and charges. Each knot can be tens of billions of miles in diameter, larger than the distance from the Sun to Pluto.

It's pure conjecture, but given that we are on a remote arm of the Milky Way with a really bad view of the universe (dust and all making our galaxy hard to see for what it is), I often wonder how much further we could have advanced scientifically if something like the Sombrero galaxy were close enough to see with the naked eye? If it took up a substantial portion of our night sky, would we have understood astronomy that much quicker? I personally think we would have, and it would be interesting to see how science and culture could have advanced because of it.

Edit: While I understand the Andromeda is faintly visible with the naked eye, I was actually envisioning something like this:

It's pure conjecture, but given that we are on a remote arm of the Milky Way with a really bad view of the universe (dust and all making our galaxy hard to see for what it is), I often wonder how much further we could have advanced scientifically if something like the Sombrero galaxy were close enough to see with the naked eye? If it took up a substantial portion of our night sky, would we have understood astronomy that much quicker? I personally think we would have, and it would be interesting to see how science and culture could have advanced because of it.

If you have dark skies, the andromeda galaxy is easily visible with the naked eye and is larger than the full moon.

It's pure conjecture, but given that we are on a remote arm of the Milky Way with a really bad view of the universe (dust and all making our galaxy hard to see for what it is), I often wonder how much further we could have advanced scientifically if something like the Sombrero galaxy were close enough to see with the naked eye? If it took up a substantial portion of our night sky, would we have understood astronomy that much quicker? I personally think we would have, and it would be interesting to see how science and culture could have advanced because of it.

If you have dark skies, the andromeda galaxy is easily visible with the naked eye and is larger than the full moon.

I think "easily" is a stretch. You need absolutely no moonlight or artificial lighting, and a very clear sky. Even then it is faint. Remember, Hubble discovered only in the twenties that the Andromeda nebula consists of stars. He was then able to resolve the variable stars and work out the distance. That's how we found out it is a separate galaxy!

When one begins to consider the eventual destabilization of the Hubble's orbit, and the loss of such wondrous technology, a requirement of Congressional committee's that deal with project's funding should be to look at a picture book front and back of the Hubble.

....Then and only then would they see and begin to understand the necessity of the greatest wonder of the world.

It's pure conjecture, but given that we are on a remote arm of the Milky Way with a really bad view of the universe (dust and all making our galaxy hard to see for what it is), I often wonder how much further we could have advanced scientifically if something like the Sombrero galaxy were close enough to see with the naked eye? If it took up a substantial portion of our night sky, would we have understood astronomy that much quicker? I personally think we would have, and it would be interesting to see how science and culture could have advanced because of it.

If you have dark skies, the andromeda galaxy is easily visible with the naked eye and is larger than the full moon.

I think "easily" is a stretch. You need absolutely no moonlight or artificial lighting, and a very clear sky. Even then it is faint. Remember, Hubble discovered only in the twenties that the Andromeda nebula consists of stars. He was then able to resolve the variable stars and work out the distance. That's how we found out it is a separate galaxy!

It wasn't that long ago that the amount of light pollution was insignificant. People back then were plenty fascinated by what they could see at night and many of them made great strides at systematic observation and interpretation of what they could see.

These pictures make me sad that I'll never get to visit any of those places in my lifetime.

Is it any consolation to consider that at the scales of these things, seeing them close would either not be as exciting, or could be harmful to your health!However, if we could travel great distances, it would be amazing to look back at earth and also to see these phenomena from other perspectives and just see what else is out there!

It's pure conjecture, but given that we are on a remote arm of the Milky Way with a really bad view of the universe (dust and all making our galaxy hard to see for what it is), I often wonder how much further we could have advanced scientifically if something like the Sombrero galaxy were close enough to see with the naked eye? If it took up a substantial portion of our night sky, would we have understood astronomy that much quicker? I personally think we would have, and it would be interesting to see how science and culture could have advanced because of it.

Edit: While I understand the Andromeda is faintly visible with the naked eye, I was actually envisioning something like this:

Spoiler: show

Please someone feel free to correct me but I don't think such a view would ever be possible.Galaxies, nebular clusters, etc. are all very faint objects which telescopes can capture in a dramatic fashion thanks to stacking multiple long exposures sometimes taken over several months.

I'm afraid in real life the view from a spaceship in interstellar space would be fairly boring... Just lots of small dots!

These pictures make me sad that I'll never get to visit any of those places in my lifetime.

Is it any consolation to consider that at the scales of these things, seeing them close would either not be as exciting, or could be harmful to your health!

That's kinda the thing--these places don't actually look like this at all. We're seeing beautiful images, but they're also carefully engineered. They're all super-long exposure, and almost every one of the pictures incorporate false colors representing wavelengths of radiation above or below what our eyes can see. Space doesn't look like this at all, unfortunately.

It's pure conjecture, but given that we are on a remote arm of the Milky Way with a really bad view of the universe (dust and all making our galaxy hard to see for what it is), I often wonder how much further we could have advanced scientifically if something like the Sombrero galaxy were close enough to see with the naked eye? If it took up a substantial portion of our night sky, would we have understood astronomy that much quicker? I personally think we would have, and it would be interesting to see how science and culture could have advanced because of it.

Edit: While I understand the Andromeda is faintly visible with the naked eye, I was actually envisioning something like this:

Spoiler: show

Please someone feel free to correct me but I don't think such a view would ever be possible.Galaxies, nebular clusters, etc. are all very faint objects which telescopes can capture in a dramatic fashion thanks to stacking multiple long exposures sometimes taken over several months.

I'm afraid in real life the view from a spaceship in interstellar space would be fairly boring... Just lots of small dots!

That I honestly don't know how it would look but figure that yes it would be less dramatic. False color images highlight a lot we normally wouldn't see, so I'm with you on that, but wouldn't it be something?

These pictures make me sad that I'll never get to visit any of those places in my lifetime.

Is it any consolation to consider that at the scales of these things, seeing them close would either not be as exciting, or could be harmful to your health!

That's kinda the thing--these places don't actually look like this at all. We're seeing beautiful images, but they're also carefully engineered. They're all super-long exposure, and almost every one of the pictures incorporate false colors representing wavelengths of radiation above or below what our eyes can see. Space doesn't look like this at all, unfortunately.

Another planet will still look like a planet even without false colors, though.

I'd also like to think that if we're far enough along in technology that we can reliably visit these places, we're probably going to have some sort of viewscreen technology that will filter the other wavelengths into visible spectrum.

Edit: Also predator-esque helmet filters.

But even so, I don't care if they are bland nothingness and not really fifty different shades of red and purple, my point is still the same.

Seeing these pictures sometimes causes me to resent the scale that I live on. Why can't I be a few billion times larger with a lifespan measured in trillions of years so that I could watch the Milky Way plow through the Andromeda galaxy at the same relative speed as a car crash?

edit: it'd be really awesome if it could be like the end of Gurren Lagann.. flinging galaxies around like ninja stars LOL

axia777 wrote:

I am wishing I had the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D with a full crew. Bye bye world. Hello Galaxies! =D To see such beauty in person would be beyond my mind's comprehension. Nature is so awe inspiring..

I started watching star trek: TNG when it was syndicated, which played the episodes all out of order, so it wasn't until deep space nine that I figured out that all (most) of the series takes place in one corner of one galaxy.

These pictures make me sad that I'll never get to visit any of those places in my lifetime.

Is it any consolation to consider that at the scales of these things, seeing them close would either not be as exciting, or could be harmful to your health!

That's kinda the thing--these places don't actually look like this at all. We're seeing beautiful images, but they're also carefully engineered. They're all super-long exposure, and almost every one of the pictures incorporate false colors representing wavelengths of radiation above or below what our eyes can see. Space doesn't look like this at all, unfortunately.

"Though the telescope had a troubled start, a much-publicized repair mission corrected its vision problems..."

Sadly, we no longer have the technology to do on-orbit satellite or telescope repairs (or construction).

The shuttles were only 10-30 % through their designed lifespan. I still can't believe our 'leaders' threw it all away because of cold feet.

Don't be so sad! We're soon going to have similar capabilities again through robotic servicing. In just the past couple weeks, our robotic servicing testbed on the space station has demonstrated the first-ever robotic refueling in space. The same facility is also being used to practice complex robotic repairs for use on satellites at geosync and beyond.

Meanwhile, for space astronomy in particular, remember that JWST is headed 1.5 million km from the earth, to the L2 Lagrange point where servicing wouldn't have been possible with the shuttle, either. Because JWST is so large (5x greater collecting area than Hubble), we have to fold it up to fit inside the launch vehicle and then have it unfurl in space, and then actively align itself to nanometer accuracies. In a very real sense, we *are* constructing JWST in space; the observatory will never exist in its fully operational configured state on the ground, because it would collapse under its own weight in 1 G.

Looking beyond JWST (it's not too soon to start planning!) we want something like a 16 meter optical space telescope capable of imaging terrestrial planets around nearby stars. That's probably too large even for JWST-style unfurled remote deployment. So we're hoping to build that in space. Right now we're working on plans for a robotic telescope construction test at the Space Station; we're hoping to ship up parts for a 1.5 m telescope and assemble them with the robotic arms there, to prove we can do it on a (moderately) small scale and advance the technologies we'll need for the 16-m someday. See the latter part of this article. This could be operational by as soon as 2017 or so.

The space shuttle was great - and the partnership between the Hubble program and the human exoploration program was great for both sides. But please, realize that for all its many successes, the shuttle was an incredible cash sink ($1.5B per launch!) and probably a technological dead end ultimately. To do really ambitious science in space, we need lower cost launches, and the shuttle was never going to deliver that. I'm far more excited about the possibilities with SpaceX and Orbital and the rest of the commercial space revolution. Stay tuned...

Part of the problem is that while these view are wonderful should they have or could be the norm the excitement and wonder wouldnt really be there. It's the appeal of what we don't have rather than what we do. I myself often wish I could roam the stars, going from here to there, seeing everything there is in the galaxy. I then remember that half the stuff out there is fatal to me and the other half is just boring, empty space. Only a realization that life in the universe is common would bring any sort of excitement to the possibility of going to different planets.

These pictures make me sad that I'll never get to visit any of those places in my lifetime.

Is it any consolation to consider that at the scales of these things, seeing them close would either not be as exciting, or could be harmful to your health!

That's kinda the thing--these places don't actually look like this at all. We're seeing beautiful images, but they're also carefully engineered. They're all super-long exposure, and almost every one of the pictures incorporate false colors representing wavelengths of radiation above or below what our eyes can see. Space doesn't look like this at all, unfortunately.

AHAA! So you admit that you just posted up a bunch of bogus pictures!I always knew "outer space" was just a bunch of lights stuck in a big dome.

These pictures make me sad that I'll never get to visit any of those places in my lifetime.

Is it any consolation to consider that at the scales of these things, seeing them close would either not be as exciting, or could be harmful to your health!

That's kinda the thing--these places don't actually look like this at all. We're seeing beautiful images, but they're also carefully engineered. They're all super-long exposure, and almost every one of the pictures incorporate false colors representing wavelengths of radiation above or below what our eyes can see. Space doesn't look like this at all, unfortunately.

Well, you have to be a bit careful about what you mean by "actually look like". :-)

The human eye is a terrible, wretched, abysmally bad detector. The eye's quantum efficiency is maybe 5% at best, even with peak dark adaption. That is, 95% of the photons that enter your eye don't get detected at all - either because they hit the wrong color of cone cell, or get absorbed by a blood vessel (gee, thanks evolution for putting the blood vessels in front of the photoabsorptive cells!), or just plain end up hitting some molecule other than rhodopsin. Furthermore, the color-vision-producing cone cells only work well under much higher illumination levels. When it's dark, we lose color vision except for that faint blue-ish tinge on everything, and our ability to see fine detail falls apart due to the absence of rod cells in the fovea. (Not that it's much better in bright light. Heck, the entire concept of "purple" is basically a bug in the human visual system. There is no such thing as a purple wavelength of light or a purple photon... there's just a blue leak in the red cone absorption spectrum.

So, if you were to put yourself in the right spot in space to see something awesome, 95% of the photons get lost and the remaining 5% turn into a near-monochrome blur by the time they reach your optic nerve. Space actually does look really cool, your eye just sucks. :-P

(Somewhat more seriously: yes, we do end up often mapping wavelengths outside of the human vision range into representative colors, but not always. I just did a spot check of the first ten images in your selection. Four are pretty much all visible light wavelengths, four are visible light plus infrared, one is all infrared, and one is UV + vis + IR. So there's a mix - but still a pretty substantial fraction that are displayed without much wavelength shifting at all. Although... don't get me started on the color gamut of monitors. Trying to display the world accurately is hard enough as it is without bringing miscalibrated heterogenous display devices into the mix too... )

What you're looking at there is a dying star evaporating. It's got layers of gas boiling off as it rotates and expanding out from its poles, spinning out into nested cylinders like a vast set of those wooden Russian dolls, and it happens to be oriented exactly edge on to our line of sight just by chance.

The Hubble Deep Field and its successors have long been my favorite Hubble images. In those images there are maybe 3-5 stars from our own galaxy, every other point of light in the image is a distant galaxy containing billions of its own stars. The imaged patch of sky "covers an area 2.5 arcminutes across, about one 24-millionth of the whole sky, which is equivalent in angular size to a 65 mm tennis ball at a distance of 100 metres." (from Wikipedia.)

It's a profound illustration of the sheer number of other galaxies in the universe.

These images are better than anything in Sci-Fi. And the interactions on show, both in terms of complexity and scale are mind-boggling.

Pubert wrote:

"Though the telescope had a troubled start, a much-publicized repair mission corrected its vision problems..."

Sadly, we no longer have the technology to do on-orbit satellite or telescope repairs (or construction).

The shuttles were only 10-30 % through their designed lifespan. I still can't believe our 'leaders' threw it all away because of cold feet.

We have the technology. Just not a working system. To make the shuttle more optimal (less risk to humans) would have cost lots and we'd probably have ended up with a new system.

The design was fine (as many non-muzzled, x-astronauts attested). The system could have been designed safer and less expensive to operate -but again, some fairly technology-illiterate politicians nixed that possibility.The reason the program was cancelled distilled down to lack of political backbone. The 'cost factor' stuff was a red herring.

The Hubble Deep Field and its successors have long been my favorite Hubble images. In those images there are maybe 3-5 stars from our own galaxy, every other point of light in the image is a distant galaxy containing billions of its own stars. The imaged patch of sky "covers an area 2.5 arcminutes across, about one 24-millionth of the whole sky, which is equivalent in angular size to a 65 mm tennis ball at a distance of 100 metres." (from Wikipedia.)

It's a profound illustration of the sheer number of other galaxies in the universe.

The Deep Field images always pull me in. I think these are probably the most profoundly amazing things I will ever see in my lifetime.

I am wishing I had the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D with a full crew. Bye bye world. Hello Galaxies! =D To see such beauty in person would be beyond my mind's comprehension. Nature is so awe inspiring..

Until some petty officer decides they want a pet tribble, or some ancient probe takes over your crewmate and the ships environmental controls so it can play out its own sun-moon myth, or an egotistical being that lives outside of the normal definitions of space and time decides that your lovely ship is a fun plaything...

Up until now I've viewed these photojournals as humdrum filler, but this one got my attention. So, now I'm off to waste an hour of my life looking at Hubble and JPL.

Lee Hutchinson / Lee is the Senior Reviews Editor at Ars and is responsible for the product news and reviews section. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and manned space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX.